An examination of lost firefly species of the US and Canada

Posted by bryanrasmussen 4 days ago

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Comments

Comment by VonGuard 1 day ago

DO NOT RAKE YOUR LAWNS.

This is why we don't have fireflys anymore. They were everywhere growing up. They lay eggs on the bottoms of fallen leaves. HOA's demand you rake your leaves. This kills the firefly.

Comment by duskdozer 18 hours ago

I wish it was just raking at this point. The only person I've seen raking in many years is my 90+ year-old neighbor. Everyone else has the backpack leafblower SWAT teams.

Comment by superb_dev 13 hours ago

It’s the same where I live and it’s insane. Nearly every day there’s a leaf blower going for seemingly hours and it’s so loud.

Comment by Johnny555 16 hours ago

We always raked our lawn when I was a child (and I did a lot of the raking), as did my grandparents who lived in their house for 40 years before I was born, yet there were always plenty of fireflies. I don't think you can blame raking for killing them off.

Comment by CalRobert 23 hours ago

Also undisturbed grass is great for ground nesting birds! We saw them return when we left a field fallow in Ireland. Less helpful in suburbia admittedly

Comment by esikich 1 day ago

That's easy to say but anyone with a lawn is typically bound by local ordinances. I don't even live in a particularly nice area and I got a warning citation for some cool looking thistle I decided to let grow this year.

Comment by bluGill 16 hours ago

Hint: you can get around most issues just by making it looking intentional. Grow a prairie in your front yard, but carefully keep a well mowed path down the middle and around the edges. This makes the whole look like a well maintained garden and will stop a lot of complaints. It won't stop everything, but it goes a long way.

Of course check what is native. Where I live prairie is native. However if you live in woods you shouldn't be planting tall grass.

Comment by darknavi 1 day ago

Noxious weed probably? They can be harmful to local ecology.

Comment by justincormack 20 hours ago

More likely a native plant.

Comment by esikich 16 hours ago

It's native. Just considered "icky".

Comment by Razengan 1 day ago

> I got a warning citation for some cool looking thistle

What the hell is this dystopia really.. oh American suburbs

Comment by CalRobert 23 hours ago

Could be lots of places.

Comment by justincormack 20 hours ago

Could it? Where else in the world has this sort of control? Most countries have more lawn freedom I think, you might get people disapprove but there are no controls.

Comment by CalRobert 19 hours ago

Certainly in the UK and Ireland there are controls. Same here in NL too.

Comment by justincormack 18 hours ago

Where in the UK? I am in the UK and I grow wildflowers all over my front lawn and no one stops me, and there are no powers to stop me.

Comment by CalRobert 11 hours ago

I apologise, I was thinking of laws about long grass being a nuisance but having looked in to it more it’s better than I thought, wildflower meadow seems ok.

Comment by Razengan 18 hours ago

I can imagine the USA declaring war on a country over unmowed lawns

Comment by stinos 17 hours ago

As a neighboring country inhabitant, now I'm curious: where in NL?

(And like the sibling comment, also: where in UK? IIRC there's a whole 'no lawns' scene in the UK)

Comment by Razengan 18 hours ago

Lawn Controls...

..just the fact that anyone can say that phrase with a straight face...

Comment by sandworm101 19 hours ago

>> DO NOT RAKE YOUR LAWNS. This is why we don't have fireflys anymore

Or, don't have lawns. Suburban grass lawns are a very unnatural structure and I find it odd that any insect would be so dependent on them. Raking leaves immediately around houses is an important fire safety measure. Perhaps the better option is to minimize lawns in favor of natural forest/tree cover where leaves are more likely to rot before they dry out enough to become a fire hazard.

Comment by bluGill 16 hours ago

Where I live tall grass is the natural structure. We have a lot of trees in our suburbs - but they don't belong at all (except on river bottoms), grass is correct (not mowed grass, but grass)

Everyone else: figure out what is correct for where you live. There is no one correct answer for everybody.

Comment by anatolian_apiar 17 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by strangattractor 1 day ago

As kid in Virginia in the 60s Summer evenings were magical - Lightening Bug galore. Then mosquito spraying began. The mosquitos remained - Lightening Bugs not so much:(

Comment by trollbridge 1 day ago

Or even a kid in the 90s and 2000s. The lightning bugs are mostly gone.

My kids think it's a big deal when they see one, and we live in a rural area with very little spraying happening.

Comment by boringg 1 day ago

Still have them galore up north where I am. Had at least a couple thousand last summer one night -- it was very cool.

Comment by derwiki 1 day ago

Whereabouts?

Comment by throwAway30303 1 day ago

Nice to see that "swatting with badminton rackets" isn't endangering them enough to make the article. As someone who was raised in a firefly-dense rural area, let me tell you, the thrill of the bioluminescent sparks is the closest I got to cocaine as a kid.

Comment by jodacola 1 day ago

I was born in and spent most of my life in the bay area before moving to Kansas City over 10 years ago (long story).

Seeing fireflies for the first time, in my 30s, was (and still is) magical.

Comment by criddell 18 hours ago

I live in the suburbs of Austin and we get them around our backyard. On nights when they were most active I would go wake up my kids and we would watch them for a while.

Comment by throwAway30303 1 day ago

They have blue ones in North Carolina! Fascinating.

Comment by ProllyInfamous 1 day ago

Here in SE Tennessee, we have a few areas with the "congregating pulses" type (i.e. they all blink [mostly] together). But they're all green, here =D

You sound remorseful (from your youthful indiscretions); but out of curiosity... does the "glow" splat when thwacked (with a tennis racket)? or does it immediately extinguish?

Comment by throwAway30303 1 day ago

It was the hellish sort of destructive behavior unique to teenage boys. Very, very fun in its own way. But, alas, perhaps I’m still paying back the universe in some way.

The bioluminescence stays lit for some time. For example, you can paint your face with it. With the rackets, they splatter like fireworks.

Comment by ProllyInfamous 1 day ago

>With the rackets, they splatter like fireworks.

[looks at tennis racket nervously]

"I'm an adult. I will not record this incredibly-sounding phenomenon for the YouTuby viewies..."

I'll just take your word for it.

----

I am forty-something, but I still always cringe when I think about that sappling I destroyed (recklessly, with my teenage-swung crowbar), just to show off to some girl...

Comment by neuroelectron 1 day ago

I thought I saw red one in the deep Pennsylvania Woods and I would definitely see blue ones occasionally.

Comment by tosapple 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by bob1029 23 hours ago

30 years ago we caught them in glass jars. They were so dense in rural Missouri that you could catch several at a time by swinging an open container through the air.

Comment by delichon 1 day ago

In this rural area the closest kids get to cocaine is methamphetamine.

Comment by vibrio 22 hours ago

This comment rings in my ears like a gunshot. I wish reality didn’t make it so poetic.

Comment by JoeAltmaier 8 hours ago

When first married and bringing my new wife home to Iowa, there were billions of fireflies over a hayfield. She said What is that? Fireflies! No, she said, that's a fairy tale.

She was astounded to find out they were real.

That was also the last time I ever saw fireflies in those numbers. Maybe 30 years ago.

Comment by Razengan 1 day ago

First we lost the stars in the sky now we lost the stars on Earth

Comment by CalRobert 23 hours ago

But wet have lots of cool up lighting to highlight your McMansion at 3AM!

Comment by anonzzzies 1 day ago

Where I live the stars are still there but the fireflies are gone. Such a shame.

Comment by Razengan 1 day ago

A city or town with no haze or light pollution? Where is that magical place?

While traveling even in rural parts of less-developed countries, there was a glow in the sky from nearby cities. When opening the curtains the sky was brighter than my room in the middle of the night!

Comment by derwiki 1 day ago

We’re always losing things, eg carrier pigeons.

Comment by anjel 21 hours ago

The problem is, humans operate as if such forces only happen to lower species.

Comment by bregma 20 hours ago

Is that really a problem? And if it is, it will resolve itself soon enough.

Comment by anjel 11 hours ago

Problematic in that it de-emphasizes anthropocene mitigations

Comment by Razengan 1 day ago

It's depressing to imagine people a couple decades from now spending their entire lives inside concrete jungles (as some already do now)

seeing only manufactured wonders, with no longing for what's beyond

Comment by TomMasz 19 hours ago

I saw some fireflies a couple of years ago. I hadn't seen any in years and haven't seen any since. They've basically disappeared. Hardly any bugs on the windshield, either. We're losing all kinds of insects.

Comment by watersb 1 day ago

Seasonal reminder: many insect species need the shelter of fallen leaves now and until springtime.

Modern lawn-care practices amount to devastating habitat loss. You can learn more about good choices for your area from your local county extension office.

If your office has been defunded, you can also try your friendly neighborhood public librarian.

Comment by SoftTalker 1 day ago

But if you let the fallen leaves sit on your lawn all winter they are a matted wet mess in the spring and they kill your lawn. I blow mine to wooded areas at the edges of my property

Comment by smt88 1 day ago

That’s just revealing how strange and unnatural lawns are. I switched to low-growing native plants and have been very happy with almost zero maintenance.

Comment by lukan 1 day ago

Well, what is natural and where is the line?

We domisticated grazing animals since a while in large numbers, the smaller ones do produce something like a lawn. And soft grass is just really nice to play around with the kids. So I also simply keep bushes and tree spots for the leaves and insects.

Comment by smt88 23 hours ago

It’s not really a complicated philosophical question.

Lawns aren’t native to your area. That type of grass didn’t evolve there, and it didn’t evolve to being trimmed short. That’s why it doesn’t produce seeds and why it’s killed by leaves.

Comment by bregma 20 hours ago

But where I live there are larges areas of native grass that evolved to being trimmed short by grazers, spreading eagerly through rhizomes as a survival trait because of frequent brush fires. It gets killed by leaves every spring and spreads back by the fall but after a burn the trees are gone and its one of the early succession pioneers. A maintained lawn is just holding a post-burn condition in stasis.

Simplistic answers really work best when things are complicated philosophical questions.

Comment by DauntingPear7 16 hours ago

Yeah and most lawns aren’t composed of native species :/

Comment by smt88 16 hours ago

Typical lawns are not native grass and don’t spread by rhizome. You’re making my point, and I can’t tell if that’s your intention or not.

Comment by lukan 18 hours ago

"Lawns aren’t native to your area."

Aside to what the other commentor has said, nature doea not mean static preservation, but it always changed all the time (and we are part of it).

Comment by lkey 17 hours ago

Native and natural in the sense of 'adapted to its environment', not 'static'

Transplanting 'English Manor' grass and lawn practices to a desert creates an unbridgeable adaptation gap. This kind of lawn cannot survive without draining every aquifer in a 300 mile radius. Texas lawns, in particular, yearn for death, you can watch them die in real time.

Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off.

They'd rather have dying sickly grass most of the year, and pay yearly to to replace, than allow a single 'weed' to be a part of their landscaping.

Comment by lukan 16 hours ago

"Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off."

In wild nature, there tend to be spikey things. I still run barefoot there. I don't care about status dynamics, but I do also like a soft grassy ground to jump and run around with my kids,

But I do let patches on the side grow complete, only mowing once a year - and especially before the fireflies come - I let the whole lawn grow extra high (with only some ways cut low) for the fireflies and insects. In spring the flowers are also nice. Still, some patches of nice lawn I always have and use with joy. It all is a compromise (still it greatly triggers me, if family members mow too early and too much).

Comment by smt88 16 hours ago

You’re just inventing your own definitions of “native” and “natural” that are different from how scientists and other people use those words. It’s a pointless semantic argument.

Comment by owlninja 1 day ago

And mosquito city during the fall here in Texas

Comment by CalRobert 23 hours ago

But grass is annoying and killing it is good

Comment by jvandonsel 16 hours ago

Raise your hand if you always assumed there was only one species of firefly.

Comment by Modified3019 1 day ago

I have too many hobbies and not nearly enough time or space, but I’ve always been interested in raising glowworms at some point.

This channel has some fairly unique practical information on raising them (and some other things as well) for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/@PeppersnGlowworms/playlists

Comment by jodacola 1 day ago

My knee-jerk reaction to this was, "sigh, more extinct species" - however, "lost species" in this context, as I learned from this paper, means:

> Herein, we define ‘lost species’ as those with no confirmed observation record within the past decade.

Confirmed from another source [0], which attempts to formalize the language (not that long ago!).

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/lost-bu...

Comment by hizlikovboy27 1 day ago

we should teach our children to live as friends with insects and other living creatures. When we were kids,we weren't this aware of it. but now I hope its time to act consciously and take action.

Comment by bob1029 23 hours ago

Don't forget about the arachnids.

Spiders are like senior members of nature's janitorial staff. I've seen them convert a periodic trail of ants into a mass grave within a few days.

Everyone I know who hires an exterminator has significantly worse issues than the occasional spider sighting. I don't actively encourage them but I also don't try to clean their homes out aggressively. I'll do yard work around them (they get until next time to move). Arachnids are unusually intelligent given their size and often seem to get the hint.

Comment by phendrenad2 1 day ago

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